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on Central and South America |
| By: | Steffens, Camila; Pereda, Paula Carvalho |
| Abstract: | Smoking bans have been widely implemented, despite mixed evidence on their effectiveness in reducing firsthand smoking. This paper provides novel insights into the dynamic impacts of smoking bans in the context of a large developing country, Brazil, that had more than 18.6 million regular smokers in 2013. Our estimation strategy exploits the staggered implementation of comprehensive smoking bans in Brazilian state capitals using an event-study framework. We also leverage the variation in policy enforcement across cities. Our results indicate that bans reduced smoking prevalence by up to 15% among young adults, particularly when rigorously enforced. This effect is primarily driven by smoking cessation, while the impact on initiation is relatively modest. Our analysis suggests that the Brazilian policy prevented roughly USD 53 million in costs in the capitals where it was highly enforced. |
| Keywords: | Smoking bans, Addiction, Policy enforcement, Difference-in-differences, Development |
| JEL: | D04 D12 I12 I18 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:312177 |
| By: | D'Aoust, Olivia Severine; Galdo, Virgilio; Ianchovichina, Elena |
| Abstract: | The paper documents the evolution of territorial disparities in labor and location productivity in 14 countries in Latin America, using millions of observations from harmonized household surveys and censuses. Between the early 2000s and the late 2010s, most countries in the region experienced significant reductions in regional inequality as real labor incomes and location productivity premia converged at the first and second administrative levels. The leveling up reflected both the slowdown in productivity growth in affluent predominantly urban municipalities and the catchup of relatively poor, predominantly rural municipalities. Absolute convergence narrowed the labor income gaps with leading metropolitan areas, including the disparitites exploitable through migration, especially among the bottom 40 percent of households, as cities de-industrialized, yet continued to attract migrants. On the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, income disparities with leading metropolitan areas remained high in nearly all countries, largely due to differences in educational attainment, but in a few countries, large differences in returns to endowments indicate potentially significant returns to migration to the leading metropolitan areas, especially for residents of relatively poor, remote regions. Rather than a clear rural-urban-metropolitan divide, in most countries the paper documents substantial overlap between the location-premia distributions of different types of second-level administrative areas and small differences between the average urban and rural place productivity premia. |
| Date: | 2023–06–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10480 |
| By: | Cotte Poveda, Alexander; Pardo Martínez, Clara Inés |
| Abstract: | The tourism industry is economically very important. According to the World Travel Tourism Council, in 2019, the tourism industry accounted for a quarter of all new jobs created worldwide, 10.3% of all jobs, and 9.6×1012 USD of the global gross domestic product. This study aimed to calculate the tourism efficiency index for different Latin American countries from 2010 to 2021 using data envelopment analysis, which analyzes the relationships between input variables (including the number of employees in the tourism industry and the number of hotel-type establishments) and output variables (including tourism expenditures in other countries and public social expenditures in recreation and culture per capita). Additionally, this study aimed to identify the countries with greater tourism development and the factors that may affect the development of the tourism industry through the stochastic frontier production function. The results of the tourism efficiency index for Central America (including Costa Rica, Dominica, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Panama) and South America (including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay) exhibited different trends. However, after the global health crisis, the tourism industry recovered, showing new opportunities to promote sustainability. The results of the stochastic frontier production function demonstrated that countries with higher levels of inbound and outbound tourism, contribution of tourism to the economy, natural resources, and literacy rate exhibited more efficient tourism industry, whereas countries with higher pollution levels exhibited less efficient tourism industry. The findings of this study could allow us to formulate suitable public policies to promote tourism, maintain natural resources, and diversify these sectors with more inclusive programmes that can facilitate growth and benefit vulnerable communities. |
| Keywords: | Tourism industry, Tourism efficiency, index Stochastic frontier, production function, Data envelopment analysis (DEA), Latin America. |
| JEL: | O10 O13 |
| Date: | 2024–12–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:123619 |